The Enormous Turnip
Week beginning 13th February
Last week
The children had a very busy week with our learning focused around the story, The Enormous Turnip. The children have been focusing on who was in our story this week - their favourites were the little old man and the mouse! The children have been able to act out the characters from our story in the role play area, where they have had their own vegetable patch and a kitchen. During the week they have developed their language and learnt lots of new words based on our story. Some vocabulary the children have by exposed to is enormous, huge, turnip, parsnip, woman. Using all of this vocabulary within their play has allowed the children to get the most out of this story. At the end of the story, the characters all sit together to eat turnip dinner. We spoke about the fact we could make vegetable soup and the children were very excited to write shopping lists of vegetables we could use to make soup.
Our kinetic letters sessions have been supporting our writing through the classroom. Our 2 friends, brave monkey and scared monkey help the children to know how and where to form their letters. The children have been making their hands and fingers nice and strong, improving their physical development. They have been using play dough to complete different pictures by rolling, squeezing and pinching the dough into shape.
Focusing on our topic for the half term 'Once Upon a Story' we have thought about different ways to listening to and retelling stories. This week we used 'Now Press Play' to listen to an alternative version of Little Red Riding Hood through earphones. The children were fully emersed in the interactive version, listening attentively to the story and acting out the events throughout. We will definitely use Now press Play throughout the year.
In maths last week the children were learning all about comparing capacity. We have been supporting the children in using new vocabulary such as heavy, light, heavier, lighter, heaviest and lightest. They have applied their knowledge by comparing the weight of different vegtables. The children had opportunities to discuss why each object was the heaviest and their reasoning behind their thoughts.
This week we have also had a visitor from MathsWhizz, where the children all across school worked as a team to solve a selection of maths sums in order to find a stolen animal from London Zoo! We really enjpoying our maths session in Reception! Thank you Maths Wizz!
During child initiated time the children were really interested this week in shadows. They have thoroughly enjoyed using the chalk outside, to draw around eachother's shadows, and drawing around Miss Davies!! It has been nice to see them going with their interests, extednt ehir learning and work together to create different patterns on the floor and walls.
This week:
This week we will be continuing our learning around our story The Enormous Turnip, where the children will have the chance to make their own vegetable soup, and will be able to try it on Friday morning! We will use this opportunity to discuss how to be safe in the kitchen and explore some of our vegtables in more detail.
If you would like to support your child's understanding of our story, there is an alternative version on youtube The Enormous Turnip (Retold by Irene Yates) I Read Aloud I Classic Tales - YouTube. You can encourage your child to discuss the similarities and differences between this story and ours!
To improve their expressive arts and design development we will be using papier-mâché to create our own enormous turnip! Aswell as providing the opportunity to explore the patterns and textures of different vegtables from our investigation table.
In our maths lessons this week we will be moving onto comparing capacity - we will have the water tray in our classroom to encourage the children to use language such as full, empty, half full, half empty. We will then be able to dig deeper into this during our taught sessions, giving them the understanding of what they are doing during their child initiated play time.
We are still learning and improving our phase 3 sounds, to encourage the children with their phonics and fluency of reading, please continue reading with your child as much as possible at home.
On Wednesday, we have a special visitor coming into Reception and Nursery. To delve deeper into our topic 'Once Upon a Story' a story teller will be joining us to share some songs, rhymes and to read and create a story with the children ususing her magical story suitcase.
We hope you have a lovely week, we can't wait to fill you in on our last week before half term.
Miss Davies and Mrs Cooper.
